HFI's-Usability Training : An Experience

One fine day my dear boss (don’t be amazed he is a good man) asked, me whether I am interested in usability. I had a blank expression on my face and wondered is this a place in Greece? Is it a new technology I am not aware of? Reading my face, he explained me the whole concept of Usability and oh boy, I got damn excited about this. So all arrangements were done and I was scheduled to attend Human Factors International’s (HFI) Usability training program for next 10 days.

Now before attending the very expensive training, I did some research about the course (which all guys do to get an edge over fellow attendees), and was amazed with the topics covered in the curriculum. So with this excitement, I entered the venue, Hotel Residence, Powai (Mumbai). Geee the entire atmosphere was awesome. No doubt we were treated royally (besides a huge training fee) with nice breakfast, tea breaks and mouth watering lunch (I m loving it!!). Ok enough of this. Let’s get some insights of our training.

HFI is a consulting company with specialty in usability for over 20 years. They are the spear heads of this field and are hired by all big organizations to make usable applications and websites. Now many of us must be thinking what this whole idea of usability is? To clear all doubts, usability means ‘how much user friendly, easy to understand, self evident, efficient and easy to use, is a web site/ application’. Phew. Too much, isn’t it?

This course comes in four modules viz.

1) User-Centered Analysis and Conceptual Design (UCA)
2) The Science and Art of Effective Web and Application Design (Design)
3) Practical Usability Testing (UT)
4) Putting Research into Practice (PRP)

I took all four courses and they were pretty cool. I personally liked UCA the most ,as I wasnt aware of it. Our trainer, Mr. Abhijit Thosar (Group lead HFI) did an excellent job of training as well as giving us relevant examples of UCA for three days. This course is the first step in a user centric designing approach. According to the guide lines of this course, we do not directly jump into design a site /application; instead we do an analysis of who the users are, their demographics, their working environment etc. It is something very logical, yet we do not follow this practice. I would recommend every person, engaged in web application development/design, to attend this course.

Now it was time to dig into Designing aspects. Mr. Hitesh Agrawal (Group lead HFI) guided us for next three days to learn correct design principles of web sites/ applications. We thoroughly enjoyed his teaching and had a lot of fun. Design course revealed some dos and don’ts for developing a user friendly web site/application. Best topics (according to me) were internationalization and accessibility. I would recommend this course as a must do for all guys working on international projects.

Usability testing was another interesting course. In this course we learnt techniques of testing an application (for usability and not for coding bugs). UT provides useful feedbacks from the end users, which helps in validating the design and discovers any bugs in the current application.

Last but not the least was PRP course. This course comes real handy for all usability consultants as it projects current web trends. This course is a consolidation of all research papers submitted on the topic of usability by researchers all over the world. We learnt interesting facts and figures about user’s behavior, and mental model.

In the end I appreciate all hard work done by the Abhijit, Hitesh, Mr Patil and Archana. Thanks for the lovely training and a good learning experience.

Haah. Wondering whether to attend this? Trust me; it’s worth its training fees. I forgot to mention, HFI also has a certification exam, which is conducted at HFI office after every two months. So attend this course, get certified and I am damn sure, your resume will look more elegant than before, of course you will also discover a new way of web site/application design and development.

Enjoy